Passionate about filling the gap between technology and business. Explaining complexity in plain English is my thing. Thriving on #cloud, #bigdata and #microservices applications. Based in Europe. Photographer wannabe. Heavy metal guitarist.

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Last week in London, the distributed systems community got together at KubeCon EU to talk containers orchestration and Kubernetes. I was there too and I would like to share with you some insights from this exciting new world.

(Sorry for recycling the picture but I simply really liked it! – Credits go to Jessica Maslyn who created it).

Insights from Kubernetes

KubeCon is the official community conference of Kubernetes, despite it was not directly organised by Google, which instead is the by far top contributor of the open source project. Google also sent a few top-notch speakers, whose presence was already a good reason to pay a visit. Kelsey Hightower (@kelseyhightower) first and foremost, with his charm and authentic enthusiasm, was one of the most brilliant speakers, capable of winning the sympathy of everyone and earning respect at his first spoken sentence.

The probably most important announcement made around the Kubernetes project was its inclusion in the CNCF (Cloud Native Computing Foundation) for its governance going forward. This was generally welcomed as a positive initiative, as it has transferred control of the project to a wider committee, but still when the project was mature enough to keep its direction and mission.

Kubernetes is moving at an incredibly fast pace

Some hidden features were revealed during the talks, that even the most advanced users did not know about, and the announced roadmap was simply impressive. We heard users saying “we’re happy to see that any new feature we’ve been thinking of, is already somehow being considered”. This gives an idea of how much innovation is happening there and how much vendors and individual contributors are betting on Kubernetes to become a pervasive thing in the near future.

Its eco-system is doing amazing things

When an open source project just gets it right, it immediately develops an eco-system that understands its value and potential and it’s eager to contribute to it, by adding value on top. This is true for Kubernetes as well, and the exhibit area of the conference brought there the most talented individuals in the industry. I’ve been personally impressed by products like Rancher, that has got really far in very short time (thing that demonstrate clear vision and strong leadership) as well as things like Datadog and Weave Scope, that have shown strong innovation in data visualization, which they definitely brought to the next level.

Has it started to eat its eco-system’s lunch?

This is unavoidable when projects are moving so fast. The border between the project’s core features and what other companies develop as add-ons is fuzzy. And it’s always changing. What some organizations see as an opportunity at first, may become pointless at the next release of Kubernetes. But in the end, this is a community driven project and it’s the community that decides what should fit within Kubernets and what should be left to someone else. That’s why it’s so important to be involved in the community on a day-to-day basis, to know what’s being built and discussed. When I asked Shannon Williams, co-founder of Rancher Labs, how does he cope with this problem, he said you have to move faster, when part of your code is no longer required, just deprecate it and move on. Sure thing, you need to know how to move *that* fast, though!

Insights from reality

As product guy, I get excited about technology but I need to feel the real need of it, in a replicable manner. That’s why my ears were all for customers, end users and use cases.

The New York Times

Luckily, we heard a few use cases at the conference, the most notable of which was the New York Times using Kubernetes in production. Eric Lewis (@ericandrewlewis) took us through their journey from how they were giving developers a server, to enabling developers provision applications using Chef, to containers with Fleet and then Kubernetes. While Kubernetes looks like an end point, and we all know something else is coming next, but according to them, that’s definitely the best thing to deliver developers’ infrastructure at present.

Not (yet) a fit for everything

What stood out the most from real use cases, is how stateful workload is not that seamless to manage using containers and Kubernetes. It was demonstrated that it is possible, but still a pain to setup and maintain. The main reason is that state requires identity, you simply can’t flash out a database node (mapped to a pod) and start a brand new one, but you need to replace it with an exact copy of the one who’s gone. Every application needs to handle state, therefore every application needs to go through this. Luckily, it was said how the Kubernetes community is already working on PetSet that should exactly address this problem. Wait and see!

But the reality today is that Kubernetes is capable of handling only parts of an application. In fact one end customer told me that a great orchestration software should be able to handle both containerised and non-containerised workload. Thumbs up to him to remind us that the rest of the world of IT still exists!

Fast pace leads to caution

“The great things about standards is that there are so many to choose from” – #sotrue about this industry #KubeCon

This could be a real problem when you have a nascent eco-system that’s proposing equivalent but slightly different approaches to things. Which one to pick? Which horse to bet on? What if my chosen standard will be the one getting deprecated? And whilst competition is good even when it comes to open innovation, this also drives a totally understandable caution from end customers. I kind of miss the time when the standard was coming first and products were based upon them, but now we tend to welcome de facto standards instead, which take some time to prove their superiority.

In the end, what really matters is having more people using Kubernetes. More use cases will drive more innovation and will bring that stabilisation required to convince even the most cautious ones. When people on the conference stage were asked to give some advices on Kubernetes adoption, this is what they said:

Make sure you have someone who supports you business wise. Don’t leave it just a technology-driven decision but make sure the reasons and the opportunities it unlocks are well understood from the business owners of your organisation.

Stick at it. You’ll encounter some difficulties at the beginning but don’t give in. Stick at it and you’ll be rewarded.

Focus on moving to containers. That’s the hard thing in this revolution. Once you do that, adopting Kubernetes will be just a no brainer.

Right, move to containers. We heard this for a while. And containers are one of those not yet standardized things, despite the Open Container Initiative was kicked off a while ago. Docker is trying to become the de facto standard here but this seems to be business strategy driven rather than a contribution to the open source community. In fact, where were the Docker representatives at KubeCon? I have seen none of them.

Disclaimer: I have no personal involvement with KubeAcademy, the organizers of KubeCon, or with any of the mentioned companies and products. My employer is Flexiant and Flexiant was not an official sponsor of KubeCon. Flexiant is currently building a Kubernetes-based version of Flexiant Concerto.

I’m so excited. On last Wednesday Flexiant has announced the acquisition of the Tapp technology platform and business. I met the guys behind it quite a while ago and I have never refrained from remarking how great their technology is (see here). I recognized a trend in their way of addressing the cloud management problem and I’m so glad to be part of, right now.

Disclaimer. I am currently working for Flexiant as Vice President Products. I have endorsed this acquisition and I am fully behind the reasons and convinced of the potential of it. This is my personal blog and whatever you read here has not been agreed with my employer in advance and therefore it represents my very personal opinion.

Right after the acquisition (read more about it here) we’ve heard tremendous noise on social networks and the press. David Meyer (@superglaze) of GigaOm in particular wrote up a few interesting comments and he picked up well the reasoning behind it, but he also ended the article with an open question:

“This [the Tapp technology platform] would help such players [Service Providers] appeal to certain developers that are currently just heading straight for EC2 or Google.Of course, this is ultimately the challenge for the likes of Flexiant – can anything stop those developers going straight to the source? That question remains unanswered.”

Well, I’d like to answer that question and say why I’m actually convinced there is a lot of value to add for multi-cloud managers.

Much has been written these days from the business side of the acquisition and I don’t have anything meaningful to add. Instead, I would like to raise a few interesting points from a technology point of view (that’s my job, after all) and unveil those values that are maybe not so obvious at the first sight.

Multi-cloud management

Multi-cloud management per se has a very large meaning spectrum. There are multi-cloud managers brokerage, therefore primarily on getting you the best deal out there. Despite this is a good example about how to provide a “multi-cloud” value, I’m still wondering how they can actually find a way to compare apples with oranges. In fact, cloud infrastructure service offerings are so different and heterogeneous that being simply a cloud broker will make it extremely difficult to succeed, deliver real value and differentiate. So, point number one: Tapp isn’t a cloud brokerage technology platform.

Other multi-cloud managers deliver value by adding a management layer on top of existing cloud infrastructures. This management layer may be focused on specific verticals like scaling Internet applications (e.g. Rightscale) or providing enterprise governance (e.g. Enstratius, now Dell Multicloud Manager). By choosing a vertical, they can address specific requirements, cut off the unnecessary stuff from the general purpose cloud provider and enhance the user experience of very specific use cases. That’s indeed a fair point but not yet what Tapp is all about.

So why, when using Tapp, developers won’t “go straight to the source”? Well, first of all, let’s make clear that developers are already at the source. In fact, to use any multi-cloud manager you need an AWS account or a Rackspace account (or any other supported provider account). You need to configure your API keys in order to enable to communication with the cloud provider of choice. So if someone is using your multi-cloud manager, it means that he prefers it over the management layer provided by the “the source”.

The cloud provider lock-in

One of the reasons behind Amazon’s success is the large portfolio of services they rolled out. They’re all services that can be put together by end users to build applications, letting developers focus just on their core business logic, without worrying too much about queuing, notifying, load balancing, scaling or monitoring. However, whenever you use one of the tools like ELB, Route53, CloudWatch or DynamoDB you’re locking yourself into Amazon. The more you use multi-tenant proprietary services that exist only on a specific provider, you won’t be able to easily migrate your application away.

You may claim to be “happy” to be locked in a vendor who’s actually solving your problems so well, but there are a lot of good reasons (“Why Cloud Lock-in is a Bad Idea“) to avoid vendor lock-in as a principle. Many times, this is one of the first requirements of those enterprises that everyone is trying to attract into the cloud.

Deploying the complete application toolkit

Imagine there could be a way to replicate those services onto another cloud provider by building them up from ground up on top of some virtual servers. Imagine this could be done by a management layer, on demand, on your cloud infrastructure of choice. Imagine you could consume and control those services using always the same API. That would enable your application to be deployed in a consistent manner across multiple clouds, exclusively relying on the possibility to spin up some virtual servers, which you can find in every cloud infrastructure provider.

This is what Tapp is about. And the advantages of doing that are not trivial, these include:

1. Independency, consistency and compatibility

This is the obvious one. For instance, a user can click a button to deploy an application on Rackspace and another button to deploy a DNS manager and a load balancer. These two would provide an API that is directly integrated into the control panel and therefore consumable as-a-service. Now, the exact same thing can be also done on Amazon, Azure, Joyent or any other supported provider, obtaining the exact same result. Cloud providers became suddenly compatible.

2. Extra geographical reach

Let’s say you like Joyent but you want to deploy your application closer to a part of your user base that lives where Joyent doesn’t have a data center. But look, Amazon has one there and, despite you don’t like its pricing, you’re ready to make an exception to gain some latency advantages to serve your user base. If your application is using some of the Joyent proprietary tools, it would be extremely difficult to replicate it on Amazon. Instead, if you could deploy the whole toolkit using just some EC2 instances, then it all becomes possible.

3. Software-as-a-(single)-tenant

If multi-tenancy has been considered as a key point of Cloud Computing, I started to believe that maybe as long as an end user can consume an application as-a-service, who cares if it’s multi-tenant or single-tenant.

If you can deploy a database in a few clicks and have your connector as a result, does it really matter if this database is also hosting other customers or not? Actually, single-tenancy would become the preferred option1 as he would not have to be worried about isolation from other customers, noisy neighbors, et al. Tony Lucas (@tonylucas) wrote about this before on the Flexiant blog and I think he’s spot on, there is a “third” way and that’s what I think it’s going mainstream.

The Tapp’s way

The Tapp technology platform was built to provide all of that. A large set of application-centric tools, features and functions2 that can be deployed across multiple clouds and consumed as-a-service.

Of course it’s not just about tools. It’s also about the application core, whatever it is. The Tapp technology solves also that consistency problem by pushing the application deployment and configuration into some Chef recipes, as opposed to cloud provider-specific OS images or templates3. Every time you run those recipes you get the same result, in any cloud provider. In fact, to deploy your application you’ll just need the availability of vanilla OS images, like Ubuntu 14.04 or Windows 2012 R2 that, honestly, are offered by any cloud provider.

All those end users who want to deploy applications without feeling locked in a specific providers, today had only one way of doing it: DIY (“do-it-yourself”). They would have to maintain and operate OS images, load balancers, DNS servers, monitors, auto-scalers, etc. That’s a burden that, most of the time, they’re not ready to take. They don’t want to spend time deploying all those services that end up being all the same, all the time. Tapp takes away that burden from them. It deploys applications and service toolkits in an automated fashion and provides users just with the API to control them. And this API is consistent, independently from the chosen cloud provider. This is the key value that, I believe, will prevent developers from going straight to the source.

1. Multi-tenancy would be the preferred option for the Service Provider because this would translate into economies of scale. However, economies of scale often obtain cost optimisation and end user price reduction and, therefore, it can be considered an indirect advantage for end customers as well.↩

3. It worths mentioning that pushing the deployment of application into configuration management tools like Chef or Puppet significantly affects the deployment time. That’s why it’s strongly advised to find the optimal balance between what is built-in the OS image and what is left to the configuration management tool.↩

There is no doubt. The product is there. The vision, too. At times, they leave some space to arrogance as well but, come on, they are the market leader, aware of being far ahead than anybody else in this field. A field they actually invented themselves. We almost feel like forgiving that arrogance. Don’t we.

The AWS summit 2013 in London has been just one more time the confirmation that the cloud infrastructure market is there, the potential is higher than ever and that Amazon “gets” it, drives it and dominates it quite undisturbed. All the others struggle to distinguish themselves among a huge amount of technology companies, old and new, who are strongly convinced of having jumped into the cloud business but, I’m pretty sure, the majority of their executives thinks that cloud is just the new name for hosting services.

Before going forward, I want to thank Garret Murphy (@garrettmurphy) for having transferred his AWS summit ticket to me, without even knowing who I was, but simply and kindly responding to my tweeted inquiry. I wish him and his Dublin-based startup 247tech.ie the required amount of luck that, coupled with great talent, leads to success.

Now, I won’t go through the whole event, because being this a roadshow which London wasn’t the first edition, much has been said already here and here. The general perception I had is that AWS is still focusing on presenting the advantages of cloud-based as opposed to on-premises IT infrastructures, showing off the rich toolset they have put in place and eventually bringing MANY (I counted nearly 20 ones) customers testifying how they are effectively using the AWS cloud and what advantages they got doing that. Ok, most of them were the usual hyper-scale Internet companies but I’ve seen the effort to bring enterprise testimonials like ATOC (The Association of Train Operating Companies of the UK). However, they all said to be using AWS only for web facing applications, staging environment or big data analytics. Usual stuff which we know to be cloud friendly.

What really impressed me was the OpsWorks demo. OpsWorks was released not long ago as the nth complementary Amazon Web Service to help operating resilient self-healing applications in the cloud. Aside from the confusion around what-to-use-when, given the large number of tools available (and without considering those from third parties which are growing uncontrolled day by day), there is one evident trend arising from that.

For those who don’t know OpsWorks, it is an API-driven layer built on top of Chef in order to automate the setup, deployment and un-deployment of application stacks. An attempt to the DevOps automation. How this is going to meet customers’ actual requirements while still keeping simplicity (a.k.a. without having to provide a too large number of options) is not clear yet.
During the session demonstrating OpsWorks, the AWS solution architect remarked that no custom AMIs (Amazon Machine Images) are available for selection while creating an application stacks. Someone in the audience immediately complained on Twitter about this, probably because he wasn’t happy about having to re-build all his customizations through Chef recipes on top of lightweight basic OS images, discarding them from his custom VM image.

In fact there are several advantages of moving the actual machine setup to the post-boostrap automation layer. For example, the ease of upgrading software versions (e.g. Apache, MySQL) simply by changing a line in a configuration file instead of having to rebuild the whole operating system image. But mostly because, keeping OS images adherent to the clean vendor releases, you probably will find them available in other cloud providers, making your application setup completely cross-cloud. Of course there are disadvantages too, including the delay added by operations like software download or configuration that may be necessary each time you decide to scale-up your application.

Cross-cloud application deployment. No vendor lock-in. Cool. There is actually a Spanish startup called Besol that is building its entire (amazing) product “Tapp into the Cloud” on the management of cross-cloud application stacks, leveraging a rich library of Chef cookbook templates. And while I was writing this post on a flight from London, Jason Hoffman (@jasonh) was being interviewed by GigaOM and, while announcing a better integration between Joyent and Chef, he mentioned the compatibility between cloud environments as a major advantage of using Chef.

What we’re observing is a major shift from leveraging operating system images towards the adoption of automation layers that can quickly prepare for you whatever application you want your virtual server to host. That means that one of the major advantages introduced by virtualization technology, that is the software manipulation of OS images, one of the triggers of the rise of cloud computing, no longer matters.

Potentially, with the adoption of automation platforms like Chef, Puppet or CFEngine, service providers could build a complete cloud infrastructure service, without employing any kind of hypervisor. And this trend is further confirmed by facts like:

The recent version of OpenStack (Grizzly) reported as a major new feature the possibility to provision bare-metal machines;

Of course there are still advantages for using a hypervisor, because certain applications require architectures made of many micro-instances for performing parallel computing, thus it’s still necessary to slice a server into many small portions. However, with the silicon processors increasing the number of cores and the ability of using threads, virtualization may not be so important anymore for the cloud.

In the end, I think we no longer can say that virtualization is the foundation of cloud computing. The correct statement could perhaps be that virtualization inspired cloud computing. But the future may leave even a smaller space for that.